


Between Us

by ungoodpirate



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: I headcanon that all Noah has kissing all the members of the Gansey at some point, M/M, Pre-Series, Ronan Swears, reference to Ronan's canonical suicide attempt that was actually a self-loathing dream thing, roah, there is kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 02:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14760770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: "Noah’s fingers were freezing where he placed them on the back of Ronan’s exposed neck."--A pre-series moment of Roah, in which Ronan is still recovering, Noah is weird and aloof and supportive. Feelings happen. Kissing happens. And things don't have to be forever to be important.





	Between Us

Noah’s fingers were freezing where he placed them on the back of Ronan’s exposed neck. 

Ronan lifted his face from where it was smashed into his pillow. He hadn’t been sleeping, but he had been doing his estimation of it. He hadn’t heard Noah come in his room and from the corner of his eye he saw the door was still shut. Sneaky fucker. 

“What’re you doing?” Ronan said. His voice was slurred because even though sleep eluded him, he was tired. It wasn’t just tired in that way where your brain refused to work, but also in that full body exhaustion way. Losing a lot of blood, and then all the following healing up, apparently did that to you. 

“Checking to see if you were alive,” Noah said. 

The marks lining Ronan’s lower arms were still fresh pink against his pale skin. They didn’t hurt, but he felt them as a phantom pain right then. 

This truth pounded through his heart: Noah had been the one to find him. 

Ronan rolled over on the bed. Noah was just standing there beside it, one hand tucked in one pocket of his school slacks. 

“Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” Ronan asked. The bright sun through his west-facing window suggested midday. 

“Shouldn’t you?” Noah countered, but it sounded less ‘checkmate’ and more ‘curiosity’. 

Ronan had skipped school before, and he had vague, passing memories of Noah joining him in playing hooky. Not by any devious plans, but coincidence. Ronan not going and Noah showing up wherever Ronan had planted himself. He couldn’t pin down an exact memory. 

It passed over him again -- Noah had been the one to find him -- and he suddenly felt like his head was being held down, underwater, in a tub of guilt. 

“What do you fucking want, Noah?” he said, because his reaction to any unpleasant emotion was anger. Anger was like an anaesthetic; when you lashed out, it made the pain inside a little less, for a little while.  

Noah -- who seemed to float through life with a strange, passive mopiness -- just cocked his head, unaffected. He blinked. 

Ronan pushed up off the bed in a sudden spur energy. He clambered out of bed and staggered across the clothes and junk scattered on his bedroom floor to the window. It was open to the breeze. He gripped the window ledge. 

He was shirtless because he had been sleeping shirtless because he had been alone in his room just ten minutes ago. 

Like an icicle, the point of Noah’s finger traced a curving line of Ronan’s tattoo. One of the vines, maybe, down and across the notch of his spine. Ronan shivered. 

He turned, shoulders stiff. Noah stood right beside him. Right in his face.

“Do you want me to throw you out the window or something?” He said from behind braced teeth. He followed with a grunt. 

“I want you to live,” Noah said. “The hardest thing of all.”

The guilt again. Noah was the one who found him. 

Maybe Ronan Lynch could try something other anger in his life. “Look, Noah --”

But he was shut up by Noah’s fingers again -- those cold, inquisitive fingers -- were pressed against his mouth. 

“You’re real, right?” Noah said. “You’re actually real.”

Ronan grabbed Noah by wrist, by the sleeve, pulling his hand away. 

“Why are you so fucking weird?” he said, but it was half affection. 

“Because I’ve been dead for six years.”

Ronan shoved him in the shoulder, pure reaction. Noah stumbled a step and released a burst of laughter deep from his chest. In punctated the tension, and ended with Ronan laughing too, something short and ragged, dragged from his the vacuum between his ribcage. 

“See?” Noah said, with a grin on his weird, smudgy face. “Living. It’s… It’s this. It’s…” He blinked, his eyes going unfocused and unpresent.

“You still in there, buddy.” Ronan tapped the side of Noah’s face. His gaze snapped back to Ronan’s, having to lift his chin to look the decently taller Ronan in the eye.

“Don’t waste it,” Noah said.

“What?” 

“There’s so much more,” Noah said. “There’s so much more that still hasn’t happened yet.”

“Remember when I said you were fucking weird. I need to correct that. You are really fucking weird.”   

“Want to go drive donuts in your car?” 

Ronan clapped Noah on his shoulder, because that was the kind of nonsense he could get used to. “Let me put on a shirt on first.”

 

#

 

They drove out to a field Ronan knew, dry and flat, perfect for driving donuts. Noah didn’t seem to enjoy the experience from the passenger’s seat as much as Ronan enjoyed it from the driver’s. Something about the wind through an open car window, the purring engine at his control, the pedals under his feet, and wheel gripped in his hands, made him feel more in control. In the moment. Alive. 

Noah -- the coward -- sat buckled, plastered to the seat, eyelids squeezed so tightly shut they stopped looking like eyelids and instead like a bunch of wrinkles. Occasionally, he made a little squeaking noise of displeasure. 

Still, when Ronan stopped, the car planted in a cloud of thrown up dust in the middle of the field, Noah loosened up and declared, “That was fun.”

“Act like you’re having fucking fun next time,” Ronan countered. 

The sun was slanted a little farther down in the sky now. It was deep afternoon. 

Noah ran a hand over the console, over his seatbelt, over the leather of the seats. 

“I used to drive a mustang,” he declared, out of nowhere.

Ronan scoffed. “Since when?” 

Noah shrugged. “A long time ago,” he answered, which was an answer that didn’t make any sense at all. He was sixteen too, just like Ronan. 

“You mean back home?” Ronan supplied, because he knew this kid had never parked a mustang in the lot at Monmouth. 

“That too.” 

Ronan shook his head. Really fucking weird.

In an effort to be more unsettling than usually, Noah now took the opportunity to stare at the side of Ronan’s head as Ronan pushed the dome of his skull against the headrest. 

“You’re lonely,” Noah said. “You’re lonely, but it will stop, eventually, when you learn to let yourself not be alone.”

Ronan shuffled in his seat, a twitch of unease. They were supposed to be having stupid fun, not -- for all that is good and holy in the world -- talking. 

“And how am I supposed to do that, riddlemaster?’” Ronan said, turning. 

Ronan’s not sure how it happened, but he was already turned on his seat, mouth in a slant of cocksure, and Noah’s right there in passenger’s seat, already unbuckled as they sat idling in the dusty field just technically outside Henrietta limits. Noah leaned the distance between them, past the gearshift, and pressed his mouth to Ronan’s. His lips were as cold as the fingers had been earlier. 

Ronan seized up, and then, after a moment, released. The touch of Noah’s mouth against his had been brief, and was soon gone, and Ronan hadn’t had enough time for his brain to catch up with it all. 

“You don’t have to be scared,” Noah said. 

“Fucking scared of what?” Ronan said, trying to be sure and easy. “You?”

“No,” Noah said, all distant and knowing and unknowing again. “You.”   

Ronan sagged against his seat again. He was very, very conscious of his mouth, his lips, how they felt now compared to a moment earlier. 

“If I tell you something un-fucking-belieavble,” Ronan said. “Will you believe me?” 

“Yes,” Noah said, like he was asking his to pass the salt than to understand the impossible. 

“And you will keep it a secret?”

“I keep a lot of secrets.”

Ronan nodded once, a tight jerk of his chin near his chest. He was conscious of his heart too, now thundering in his chest, and how fragile it was. 

“I can’t fucking explain what happened, so don’t ask, but… I didn’t try to kill myself. I know that’s what it looked like. But it was an accident.”

“...I know,” Noah said.

“You do?” Ronan replied, startled. 

Noah blinked at him, eyes wide and pale. “Yeah, you told me already.” 

“Huh?” 

“I mean now,” Noah said. “No wait, I mean later.” 

Ronan said, “Super fucking weird.” 

“I graduated to another level!” Noah said, cheery and pleased. Maybe that was it, this sharp joy cut through Noah’s usual aloofness, that had Ronan lean in this time. Noah met him. 

Ronan hadn’t thought about it before, but Noah was good at meeting people partway. He was there when you needed him. 

Noah had found him. 

The kissing between them was tentative, exploratory, and new. But this part of Ronan, which had been there, untouched… exposing it, acting on it, trying it was an experience tentative, exploratory, and new. 

It didn’t last two long, for soon the sun was at an angle that pierced light straight into his eyes, but when an experience was new it had a way of becoming a paradoxical time casym of its own, both stretched long with every new sensation and collapsing on itself, too short and not enough. But things don’t have to last forever to be important. 

“Gansey will be home by now,” Noah commented, and Ronan refused to comment on his use of the word ‘home.’ 

Ronan shifted the beemer into gear. “We keep this between us,” he said. 

Noah replied, “I’m good at keeping secrets.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't posted any fic in a while, but I've been writing it. And it keeps turning out to be those things that are supposed to be short and then grow super long instead. 
> 
> Anyway, this was inspired from some really cute pieces of Roah fanart I saw on tumblr to create something for this couple. 
> 
> As always, find me on tumblr at ungoodgatsby and/or writermargerybayne.


End file.
